"Discovering Women" (9 p.m. Wednesday, Channel 9) fill an informational void, its profiles of six contemporary women scientists make the field come alive as an appealing, fulfilling and, most important, accessible career choice for American girls.

Produced by Boston's WGBH and narrated by Catwoman herself, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Discovering Women" is accompanied by an extensive national educational outreach campaign (funded by the likes of the National Science Foundation and Intel) designed to spark middle-school students' interest in science. It's a campaign of vital importance, not only because American students, male and female, have fallen behind in science and math skills but because girls have traditionally been steered away from (or have steered themselves away from) those fields.

Happily, for the students who will be encouraged to sit through all six hours of it for extra credit,

Rarely has TV made science look like this much fun. And that's partly due to the marked contrast between these women and the male scientist types (either dull and nerdy or eccentric and nerdy) we're used to seeing on PBS.

Harvard Professor Franklin, the subject of the first hour, "High Energy," designed a 70-ton collider detector microscope to track the tiniest particles in the universe in hopes of better understanding the process that caused life on Earth. She describes the excitement of her first college physics project as a rush akin to staying up all night listening to Frank Zappa, except

"You got to stay up all night long building things. What could be better?" A free spirit with a stand-up comic's timing and contagious self-confidence, Franklin is shown in a rare moment of relaxation listening to Nirvana at head-splitting levels.

In "Earth Explorer," McNutt of MIT comes off as a virtual superwoman, a widowed mother of three young daughters whose life is scheduled down to the second. One day she's dealing with upset stomachs, broken lawnmowers and the first day of school, the next, she's gleefully exploring rocks with colleagues in Tahiti.

"Discovering Women" offers fully rounded portraits of its subjects' lives, both professional and personal; it demystifies the scientist for girls as well as boys, shows that they aren't geeks who sprung fully formed from a test tube.

The scientists' childhood recollections are diverse, yet familiar. In "Jewels in a Test Tube," Jordan discusses growing up in one of Boston's roughest black housing projects; she was jolted out of an aimless, troubled adolescence by a rousing presentation from the local Upward Bound, the Johnson-era federal program to encourage academic excellence in minorities. It was in this program that Jordan discovered her aptitude for physics.

McNutt tells a charming story about playing astronaut with her fourth-grade girlfriends. Her parents, however, don't remember seeing any special signs of McNutt's scientific inclination.

If there's a common thread running through the subjects' childhood memories, it's the presence of strong female role models. Franklin says that her mother, an artist and film producer who "brought her work home," taught her that "it's completely sane to be passionate about what you're involved in." McNutt, who attended all-girl schools staffed entirely by female teachers, says,

"Anyone who was doing anything in my life was female, so it never crossed my mind . . . that there was something I wouldn't be able to do just because I was a woman."

Another common theme in the women's stories is discrimination by male classmates and colleagues as they advanced up the ladder. "Discovering Women" also shows how a science career and a family fit together - which is to say, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

Says McNutt candidly, "Science is not a field that one easily drops out of, raises a family and then drops back in." Her solution: A live-in housekeeper / nanny who does the "mother things" while Marcia does the "father things."

At the heart of "Discovering Women" is the contention that women are underrepresented in science fields not for lack of opportunity but for years of social conditioning - women are not supposed to be curious.

For instance, there's a telling contrast between two generations in "High Energy." Franklin's mother is enthralled with a new kitchen gadget, a little hand that can carry items across a table without falling off the edge. Franklin watches it with a faint tug of amusement on her lips, then asks her mother, "Do you know how it works?" Her mother shrugs. Franklin turns it over, points to the sensor and declares, "It's trivial."

One small step for a kitchen gadget, one giant leap for womankind.&lt;